El Torrente
by Vagrancy
Summary: He tells rooms of sharpeared policemen who’s guilty and who’s not, voice high and computerscrambled, Wammy standing in for him, and this is how you save a life. Preseries, Lcentric. Gore. Language.


-1The police chief is vomiting when L arrives at his first crime scene, and he's wondering if this is the job the chief should be doing, because he doesn't seem to be handling this with grace.

The victim, the body, it used to be a four-year-old girl, brown-haired and, maybe, green-eyed, but there's nothing left but gaping bloody sockets, hollow and hungry against her small red face. She's wrapped around a tree, baby-fat limbs curled around the bark, and she's like a rag doll, torn open and leaking stuffing all over the place.

The entrails glistening and strewn in that bright afternoon sun, the police, they're looking away and say that, without a doubt, an animal did this. Yeah, some wild animal, he grabbed this girl, this child prey, and he ripped her open with sharp teeth and drug her here, in the night. That's when the animals usually come out, one man explains to the other, and L knows--he_knows_--that the type of animal they're talking about, it doesn't have claws and fur.

L licks icing off his lips and looks at Wammy, that pleading panda-look he wore through his orphanage childhood, and he doesn't want to have to do this. It seems like such a chore. Murderers who leave clean crime scenes behind, they're almost always caught; them, they're so obsessed with cleaning up the blood, making everything so sterile and white and cotton-quiet, that they forget to clean up their own evidence. This proves true, time after time, and L knows that this murderer probably won't be caught. The gory ones, the loud splashing ones, they're always so very hard to capture.

And he'll try to catch the killer, yeah, he'll try as hard as he can, but he just has this _feeling_. This taste in his mouth, the bittersweet flavor of regret and remorse and drowning helplessness, it's telling him that he won't get anywhere.

"This is hopeless," L says, and he watches the police move, touch the tree with fleeting gloved fingers and ignore the body-thing, that torn shell, trying hard not to end up being quietly sick behind another tree, trying not to mirror their superior. L, he stands there in fraying baggy jeans and a too-big sweatshirt, and everything is so humid when the sun goes behind clouds. English summer rain, and there's a child-killing bastard on the loose and a body ravaged and thrown in a forest and there's a stampede in his head, and he's thinking that he'll never show himself at an investigation again.

"It seems that way," Wammy replies, sneaking thin fingers of the boy's shoulder. "But don't be so pessimistic."

And L, not even a detective yet, his name too big for him still, he walks up to the victim and notes every bruise and abrasion and tear, takes it all in with wide black eyes, shadowed by the beginnings of dark circles (two sleepless nights and he's thriving on nothing but too-sugary coffee), and thinks, maybe, definitely, he'll catch the person who did this.

L, he slaves over the investigation for weeks, and he touches that body so many more times than he'd ever imagined, talks to too many scared people, and he has to keep reminding himself that's he's K's successor. He's the best, and he must prove himself, catch this horrible person, and it might kill him, but at least he'll die being useful.

Day thirty-one of the investigation leads to a breakthrough, and by then, he's lost fifteen pounds and countless hours of sleep, gained dark bags beneath sore eyes and shaking hands. The young man is reaching for a creme-filled donut when he announces that he knows, finally, who it was that killed the girl. He shows evidence and gives answers with the pastry in hand, and he realizes, right then, that he had no interest in the case whatsoever.

L tells Wammy this after the man is caught and imprisoned, and he's smiling and proud and, oh, justice. L, he says, "I wanted to catch the criminal, as I'm sure you're aware. But I wouldn't have taken this case on, if I'd had the choice. It was so routine, so . . . human. Boring, almost."

And from anyone else, that would almost be callous, but Wammy, he understands L better than anyone.

* * *

After his success with that case, after England has forgotten about the little girl torn open around a tree, eyes carved out and organs stinking and red in the humidity and sunlight, L becomes less human, more impersonal.

He's nothing but a letter on a screen to everyone he works with, and he sits in a rented room with floor-to-ceiling windows (he has to have windows, he tells Wammy, every time the older man orders an apartment for him to stay in. It's the closest he can get to the outside world without letting himself be seen) and sleeps and eats and stares at his computer screen in the dark.

Gaining respect and adoration, he gains control of police forces across the earth, and L, he picks his own riddle-crimes to solve. The most interesting and perverse and bizarre, they're all so very appealing, and he'll take them on by himself, if no one is brave enough to go in with him.

He tells rooms of sharp-eared policemen who's guilty and who's not, voice high and computer-scrambled, Wammy standing in for him, and this is how you save a life. Ending one to prolong many, it evens out in the end.

It's justice, a concept that's been driven into his mind for as long as he can remember thinking clearly, and justice, that's why and what he is. A multifunctional tool designed to make the world a better place, a letter, is all he is. L.

L, he feels goose-bumps rising on his skin when he sees criminal after criminal dying of heart attacks, and, maybe, maybe, he's getting cocky, because he's so certain he'll solve this case, so certain that it's not just coincidence.

His fiftieth hour awake finds him on a private jet to Japan, and L, L, he's going to make Wammy House and K proud. He has this feeling, that this case, the "Kira case", it's going to be different than anything else that's caught his interest.


End file.
